Treatment processes are an important way to achieve surface properties, which can have significant impact on the performance of a component. As used herein, the term “treatment,” and grammatical variations thereof, is intended to encompass growth or application of material (for example, coating) and surface modifications through use of a chemical (for example, functionalization).
Known treatments include material being applied to various surfaces through thermal chemical vapor deposition. Such materials are generally applied in flow-through systems that involve constant flow of a gas through a reaction chamber, which do not include the gaseous soak and include features that do not allow conditions for flow-through systems to translate to conditions for systems that are not flow-through. Some application has been through static processes involving pump and purge cycling of a reaction vessel, with periods of a gaseous soak within the reaction vessel.
Flow-through processes allow for a constant or substantially constant concentration of a precursor fluid to contact a surface, which is desirable because it allows for coatings to be applied with no gas phase nucleation. However, such flow-through processes are limited to line-of-sight techniques that coat surfaces within a direct line or substantially close to the direct line. Such flow-through processes are expensive and wasteful by having an over-abundance of the gas precursor that does not deposit on such surfaces.
Atomic layer deposition allows coating of regions that are not line-of-sight or close to a direct line. However, atomic layer deposition is a single layer process that has substantial economic challenges due to the prolonged processing conditions required to achieve coating.
Prior techniques of using thermal chemical vapor deposition have addressed above drawbacks of flow-through techniques and atomic layer deposition. The comparative precision of flow-through techniques, such as plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition, has caused certain extremely sensitive industries to believe that thermal chemical vapor deposition is not an option. Such industries have previously considered the sensitivity to be beyond the functional possibility for thermal chemical vapor deposition and only capable of being satisfied through wasteful flow-through techniques.
Prior techniques involving thermal chemical vapor deposition have focused on a broad range of thicknesses. Coatings with greater thicknesses, for example, exceeding 800 nm, have been considered desirable. However, such coatings have had undesirable properties corresponding with homogeneous wetting regimes.
Thermal chemical vapor deposition processes and thermal chemical vapor deposition treated articles that show one or more improvements in comparison to the prior art would be desirable in the art.